The Dangers and Necessities of Industrial Agriculture - Research Paper Example

The Dangers and Necessities of Industrial Agriculture The future of food security is one of the most troubling circumstances facing the world today.The first part of The Omnivore Dilemma, which deals with industrial agriculture, outlines the production and development of agriculture in an industrialized setting (Pollan 13). Agriculture had, for thousands of years, been only a subsistence affair: people were only able to produce enough food to feed their own family or clan, with possibly a little extra for very short distance trade (Brothwell 368). Eventually basic agricultural techniques began to evolve and produce more food, leading to slight surpluses, which eventually grew and grew allowing the first civilizations with specialists such as soldiers, kings and bureaucrats to serve them (Diamond 34). Over time agricultural techniques have slowly advanced, leading to world populations that have, more or less, slowly advanced with them, leading to increasing population densities and further increasing food production (Diamond 97). This process all changed drastically with the most important process in human history, the industrial revolution. The introduction of steam engines, trains that could rapidly transport goods over great distances, and the ability to use powered machinery to plant, gather and process agriculture produce meant an explosion of population unlike what had ever been seen previously (Buckley 17). It took all of human history to the year 1800 for world population to reach one billion. It then trebled to three billion by the year 1950, and had doubled again to six billion by 1999, before adding another billion by 2011 (23). Obviously these population increases, a result of industrial agriculture, would have far-reaching effects on all parts of human society. Most of all, however, food production leading to higher populations leads to more intensive food production, in unsustainable cycle that needs to, somehow, be altered. The Problems There are myriad problems caused by industrial agricultural practices and the high populations it help support. The first series has to do with food security. Food security is essentially how secure one’s food source is – how likely it is to be disrupted and how dangerous any disruption would be. The combination of extremely high world population and industrial agriculture weaken food security in several important ways. The first is simply a lack of food stores. For the vast majority of human history agricultural peoples have built up large food stores, sometimes years worth, in order to be able to deal with any disruption of food security (Brothwell 370). This meant that if there were a massive war in which fields were burnt, or a year or two of drought, flooding or other disruptions of food production, a population would have a store to lean on, minimizing if not completely preventing starvation. In this situation, only extremely prolonged conflicts or inclement weather to substantially shake the ability of a people to feed themselves, meaning that food security was relatively high. Now, however, the world has essentially zero food stores from season to season (Baarchers 188). Everything is eaten or consumed in some other way as soon as possibly can be, and there simply is not enough agricultural production to make a food stores big enough to feed the billions of people in the world for a matter of months, much less years. This means that any disruption, such as the widespread droughts that have been hitting the western end of Africa this past two years, leads to immediate starvation and death rather than giving a grace period of several years based on food stores (Lichtfouse 87). Industrial food production, along with the population explosion it has caused, weaken food security by nearly completely eliminating substantial food reserves of any kind on a world wide scale. The reduction and elimination of world-wide food stores is not the only way that practices of industrial farming have hampered food security. Another major way is food transportation and proximity of production to consumption. Under industrial agricultural practices which utilize the extensive road and rail systems of industrial countries, it is almost always more efficient to focus on a limited production of very few kinds of food over a large track of area, knowing one can cheaply transport one’s goods to wherever they need to go. One megafarm will produce only corn, for instance, knowing it can ship its grains to a pig farm far away which relies on them. Likewise, both a corn megafarm and a pig megafarm may be a great distance away from giant urban areas where the majority of their consumers live, again knowing that they can easily ship their produce to the consumers (Wenner 18). This situation, however, is highly vulnerable to disruption, and disruptions tend to cause disproportionately large consequences. For instance, if there is a major storm which damages the railways that connect the corn megafarm to the pig megafarm, and both farms to urban areas, pigs will die, people will go hungry, and corn will go bad waiting to be shipped while the railways are being repaired. If one farm grew corn to feed to its own pigs and in close proximity to the people who want to consume both products, however, the situation would be far more stable and the food security risk would be much lower. Industrial agricultural practices create highly efficient and thus cheap sources of food, but at the danger of being more highly precarious and vulnerable to even minor disruptions. The final way in which industrial agriculture inhibits food security also relates to its tireless search for the most productive methods of food production. One of the main aims of industrial agriculture is to produce food in the most economically efficient mode possible, and when talking about food efficiency can often be measured in calories of food produces per unit of ground (Baarschers 119). This is because many of the foods we eat could have any source of root food production. Potato chips are interchangeable with corn chips, for instance, and meat, dairy and egg animals can all be fed essentially any grain product, so the goal is choosing the grain product that will produce the most on the smallest amount of land with the smallest amount of work. In many parts of the world, there is one plant that is far more advanced in all of these metrics than any other: corn (Wenner 16). For this reason, the average North American meal consists of almost entirely corn. The dairy, meat and egg animals were fed corn, so their products are essentially a processed form of corn (16). Soft drinks contain high fructose corn syrup, cookies and breads are made using corn by-products (17). Superficially, this reliance on corn does not seem to be too bad a thing – obviously when trying to feed masses of people using the most efficient plants makes sense. The problem, however, is that limiting a huge amount of one’s food production to a single species of plant severely weakens food security. Certain whether conditions are more likely to negatively affect some plants than others, meaning a monocrop diet is more liable for starvation, whereas a multicrop diet would provide some protection. Furthermore, closely genetically related plants (such as all strains of corn) would be susceptible to the same viruses and insects, meaning a bad phage or unusually large or strong swarm could wipe out a huge portion of food production (Pollan 43). Industrial farming’s current overreliance on a single crop for a huge portion of the calories available in the food market drastically increases the danger of a devastating collapse of food networks compared to a more diversified, if less efficient, crop assortment. Clearly there are many aspects of industrial agriculture which pose a significant risk to world-wide food security, leading in part to the multitudes of famines and crop shortages over recent years. These, however, are unfortunately not the only issues with the practice of industrial agriculture. As mentioned many times, industrial agriculture is entirely focused on producing as much product as possible from a given set of resource in the most efficient manner possible. There are several interlocking technological advancements which all serve a part in doing that: use of artificial fertilizers and pesticides in large scales on plants, and use of hormones and antibiotics in large scales on animals (Baarschers 215). These technologies do an admirable job at accomplishing the goals of industrial farming. Fertilizers replace nitrogen to the soil that is removed by plants when they grow, allowing growing season after growing season without having to leave the fields fallow, amounting in higher yields every season and more growing seasons in a year (Smith 19). Pesticides, whether produced by plants in the form of GM (genetically modified) plants or applied by planes protect these high yields by repelling or killing pests that would eat them. Likewise, additions of hormones into animals allow them to grow faster and produce more food than would otherwise be possible, and introduction of antibiotics into their feed allow them to be kept in close conditions without spreading diseases to each-other, allowing higher yields (Baarschers 214). Technology allows industrial agriculture to produce food on a truly unimaginable scale. The problem, however, is that the techniques used to increase food yields have long term negative effects on the environment. Fertilizers enter the water supply, causing mass fish die-offs, poisoning drinking water and removing oxygen from water environments (Hites 15), while pesticides spread far over the area they are supposed to leading to cancer and consumption by humans and other animals accidentally (19). The hormones used to give animals such amazingly fast growth also cause significant problems in fish populations, and could also have a measurably negative effect on humans (27), while the antibiotics both breed antibiotic resistances in microbes, and enter food chains of other animals causing harmful effects. Furthermore, the intensive agricultural production that is the hallmark of industrial agriculture leads to soil erosion, the creation of deserts, and produces vast amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere both through using machinery to produce food and trucks to transport it around the world (Bruce 966). The environmental destruction caused by industrial agriculture is completely unsustainable, and will eventually lead to deadly lowering of agricultural production on the long term, eventually causing people to starve (Buckley 18). The final problem caused by industrial agriculture has nothing to do with the neither the environment nor food security, but rather with how successful it is at doing what it is supposed to be: producing food efficiently. This has created a loop of population and agricultural increase which is almost impossible to stop now that it has begun. Improved food production efficiency allows for a larger population, which then demands further increases of agricultural efficiency, which then leads to increased population in a seemingly ever-lasting loop. This means that any change in agricultural practices which leads to a decrease in production, no matter its other merits, is almost impossible to do, because it will lead to starvation, as food is at a premium. There are some solutions to this problem, but they are incredibly difficult to accomplish. This means that, to a degree, industrial agriculture always seems to be an essential, unmoveable part of modern life. Industrial agriculture, though evil, may be a necessary evil. Solutions As one can see, the problems presented by industrial agriculture are incredibly complex and as such no single solution could possibly be presented. Any attempt to solve the problems presented must come from a wide variety of angles and attempt to solve a variety of problems simultaneously. The problems of food security and environmental degradation have, quite thankfully, rather simple solutions in theory if not in practice. The main problems with food security caused by industrial agriculture rest on the paucity of diversity in food products and the great distances involved with shipping them around. The solutions, then, are fairly obvious. Policies need to be adopted that encourage a combination of local and diverse food production where at all possible. Possibly governments should give subsidies to large organizations such as universities or hospitals that purchase local food, or possibly give increased subsidies to farmers who choose grow a wide variety of crops. Farmers also need to take a role in educating the public in why they should be willing to pay slightly more for local produce, and the ways in which local produce are better for both the palate and the environment than industrially farmed produce from further afield. The environmental degradation likewise has a simple theoretical solution. If the use of high yield agricultural techniques cause erosion, this needs to cease. Farmers need to be encouraged to grow organic food which does not have the pesticides and hormones that cause damage to people, plants and animals. All of these solutions may sound overly simple, and if they do, it is because they quite simply are. The obvious problem is that the solution to the problems of industrial agriculture is simply dismantling many aspects of industrial agriculture – pesticides cause problems, stop using them; monocrops weaken food security so diversify, and so on. The problem is that industrial agriculture exists for a reason – with the current way the world consumes and its food, if we abandon industrial agriculture and the high food yields it creates, people will quite simply starve. There are two linked solutions to this problem. The first is changing the kinds of food is consumed. Currently, people in North American and Europe eat relatively large amounts of meat (Pollan 213). Meat is an incredibly inefficient food to produce: only ten percent of the suns energy is converted into energy in plants, and when meat animals eat these plants they gain only ten percent of that energy, and when humans eat these animals they gain only 10 percent of that energy (Baarschers 27). This means that only one percent of the energy in plants is gained when meat is consumed. Shifting to a more vegetarian lifestyle would allow for a surplus of food whereby the world could afford drops in agricultural efficiency that would be caused by abandoning aspects of industrialized agriculture. This could be combined with a steady decrease in population to a more sustainable level would allow a slow drop of industrial techniques. Call to Action Just as there is no single solution to the problems of industrialized agriculture, there is no single group or entity which can enact these solutions. To help solve the problems caused by industrial agriculture action needs to be taken by a large number of people. As mentioned previously, governments need to help incentivize better agricultural practices, either though subsidies of farmers who grow food in a sustainable way, consumers who buy such produce, or through regulation which does not allow environmental degradation in farm practices. Farmers likewise need to take their role as environmental stewards more seriously, and realize that if they destroy the ability of their land to produce food, it will harm them and following generations. They need to take an active role in educating the public about the benefits of locally produced, organic food versus the problems associated with large scale industrial agriculture. And finally, consumers of food themselves have to take a leading role by changing their lifestyle, lowering the amount of meats they eat, choosing to buy slightly more expensive non-industrially farmed foods, and taking an active role in population reduction. These are surely not simple things to do, but they are important things to do, because the current form of industrial agriculture cannot be sustained indefinitely, nor can the constant population rise of the past few hundred years be sustained. Changes must be made, and they will be hard, but necessary. Works Cited Baarschers, William H. Eco-facts & Eco-fiction: Understanding the Environmental Debate. London: Routledge, 1996.  Brothwell, Don. "Early History of Agriculture." Nature 255.5507 (1975): 368-70. Print. Bruce E Dale, Hyungtae Kim, and Seundgo Kim. “Biofuels, Land Use Change, and Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Some Unexplored Variables” Environmental Science and Technology 43 (2009): 961-967. Buckley, Richard. World Population: Still the Biggest Problem? Cheltenham, England: Understanding Global Issues, 2005. Print. Diamond, Jared M. Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies. New York: Norton, 2005. Print. Lichtfouse, Eric. Sustainable Agriculture. Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2009. Print. Hites, R. A. Persistent Organic Pollutants in the Great Lakes. New York: Springer, 2006. Print. Pollan, Michael. The Omnivores Dilemma: a Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print. Smith, Mark. "Nitrate Pollution and Sustainable Agriculture." Nitrogen and Methanol 135 (1998): 17-22. Print. Wenner, Melinda. "Children of the Corn." Mother Jones 34.4 (2009): 16-18. Web. Read More